Contents

Desktop

Even the most hardcore Linux fan would admit that their favorite OS has not captured more than a very small market share on personal computers. And that would include us here at Pingdom: all of our engineers and 50% of or our developers are, in fact, running Linux.

There are some fundamental things that every person who turns on a Linux box should be familiar with before proceeding. Some of these things are often overlooked or never learned by new Linux users. It’s a shame, actually. Knowledge of the fundamentals can create a great foundation for further advancement later on down the road. If you’re going to learn something, learn it right.

There are several reasons that I love using Linux. Ubuntu to be more specific. It’s definitely not for everyone, but if you can get by without the latest and greatest games, it’s generally a great operating system. Sure, there are some annoyances, but name one operating system that doesn’t have any. Want to know some really great things about Linux that make it number one in my book? I’ll tell you…

The prototype of the National Software Platform (NSP) – the Russian operating system that is intended to replace Windows on computers in public agencies and schools – has been approved by the Ministry for Telecommunications. Instead of providing a single NSP distribution, the developer – PingWin software – is suggesting four, one from each major Russian Linux developer.

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

When Linus Torvalds says he is going to work on a side project he doesn’t think small and he doesn’t work slowly.

When he created “Git,” the software source control and collaboration system that runs Linux kernel development, he started writing code on a Sunday (April 3, 2005) and emerged just a few days later with a new revision control system that today is regarded as one of the best pieces of software ever written (second, at least, to Linux, of course).

Graphics Stack

Christian König of AMD has shared his plans for completing work on the VDPAU state tracker for Gallium3D. This Gallium3D state tracker allows for NVIDIA VDPAU video acceleration using GPU shaders on open-source hardware drivers such as Radeon and Nouveau.

Christian published a new, lengthy patch-set that adds most of the missing functionality to the VDPAU state tracker. One of the missing items that has been filled in is support for bit-map surfaces.

Earlier this month I published an article with benchmarks of the Gaming/Graphics Performance On Unity, GNOME, KDE, Xfce. Now, however, there’s a much larger comparison, including results from OpenBox, Lubuntu, GNOME classic, and other desktop alternatives.

An independent Phoronix Test Suite user has been uploading large amounts of test results to OpenBenchmarking.org of different desktop / graphics driver options and their impact on graphics tests. Here’s the latest results including runs from GNOME classic, GNOME 3, GNOME + Openbox, Lubuntu, Openbox, Unity, Unity 2D, KDE Plasma, Xfce, and other software configurations. The tests from this user not affiliated with Phoronix.com was running from a NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M graphics card. The user also tested Ubuntu 11.10 and the current Ubuntu 12.04 state.

Games

While some indie Linux game sales have generated more than two million dollars in two weeks, that isn’t the case for all indie Linux games. One example of a Linux game struggling is the latest title from Kot In Action, the well-known game studio behind the Steel Storm series.

Clementine isn’t perfect. It doesn’t read Internet radio tags, there’s no podcast management tool, and it doesn’t have a workable sync feature. But it does have an impressive list of expected features, and what it lacks I can live without. It will likely have a strong appeal for anyone who fondly remembers old-school Amarok.

GNOME Desktop

The first beta of GNOME 3.4 came out at the tail end of last week, which means that we are roughly on track for a final release at the end of March. The beta also marks the beginning of the UI freeze for this cycle, so now seems like a good time to check out the cool stuff that’s coming in 3.4.

I’ve been writing 2 articles listing some nice conky configs that I found on gnome look and devianart and got a lot of visitors for these two articles so I guess linux users are always interested in conky. Today I just checked gnome look again and found 4 new beautiful conky that just have been submitted in January and February this year. If you are a fan of conky, you should take a look at these conky configs.

I originally got interested in checking out the Chakra project because it was based on Arch Linux. As I mentioned before, the super customizability doesn’t appeal to me. I don’t have time for that – perhaps if Arch had existed when I was in high school or college I might have enjoyed it. What I do like is that they tend to have the latest packages and they tend to keep the distro as simple as possible – with very few customizations. When I went to do my pre-review research, I found out that while Chakra WAS based on Arch, they’ve now split off into their own proper distro. (Kinda like Fuduntu and Fedora) While they still use Pacman and other Arch-y things, they’re slowly changing to their own products.

“Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth”, said Archimedes. Can Chakra Linux move the Linux World? At the very least, it is a clear example of how a young project can grow and improve fast, becoming more interesting release after release. Let´s have a look at its latest release, Chakra 2012.02 “Archimedes” MEETING ARCHIMEDES This last Chakra release is one of the first distros to incorporate KDE SC 4.8. This already is a plus and a good reason to try Archimedes, for KDE SC 4.8 is awesome, but there is a lot more to this release than that. Here’s a brief list of features: – KDE SC 4.8.0 – Linux 3.2.2 (2.6.35.14 optional) – Qt 4.8 – DVD image, including all locales and a nice selections of apps – minimal CD image you can build your desktop on – tomoyo-tools 2.5 added to a default install, for more security options – wqy-microhei became the new default font for Chinese/Japanese/Korean – QtWebkit 2.2.1 – Boost 1.48, switch to GRUB2

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandrake/Mandriva Family

Bill Reynolds, the founder of and main developer for PCLinuxOS, is the very heart and soul of the distribution. Users who were clamoring for his custom Mandrake packages encouraged him to start his own distribution. It is Texstar’s touch that makes the distribution rock-solid dependable and stable. His devotion to quality and stability has been evident ever since he first created PCLinuxOS. As regular users, we owe a lot to Texstar. I will take dependability and reliability over bleeding edge any day of the week.

Red Hat Family

Fedora

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has clarified their stance on how the Fedora Project should view software forks. In particular, forks with much talk these like the Cinnamon and Mate desktop environments.

A ticket was filed this weekend for FESCo, the engineering committee for the Fedora project, to clarify their position on forks like Muffin, Mate, and Cinnamon (i.e. the GNOME desktop forks).

Fedora 17, which is codenamed the Beefy Miracle, is now up to its alpha milestone with many new features for this exciting Red Hat sponsored release.

Dennis Gilmore wrote the Fedora 17 Alpha announcement entitle Meat the Beefy Miracle. “Hot dog! The Fedora 17 “Beefy Miracle” Alpha Release is available! This release offers a preview of some of the best and meatiest free and open source technology currently under development. Relish in a glimpse of the future.”

Dennis Gilmore, Release Engineer at Red Hat for Fedora, today announced the kick-off of the run-up to Fedora 17 with Alpha 1. He said, “Hot dog! The Fedora 17 “Beefy Miracle” Alpha Release is available! This release offers a preview of some of the best and meatiest free and open source technology currently under development. Relish in a glimpse of the future:”

As usual Fedora always brings the latest development open-source software to its releases, also comes with variety of options depending on the the user usage if the user will use it as an “end user”, “system administrator”, “Developer”, or “Virtualizing purposes”. Fedora 17 Alpha comes with many up to date softwares and several changes to the desktop environments “Fedora Spins”, which has been updated to the latest upstream releases such as Gnome 3.4, KDE 4.8 and Sugar 0.96 desktop.

Debian Family

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

While most x86 hardware shipping in the past few years has been x86_64-capable, Canonical has continued recommending the 32-bit version of Ubuntu Linux over the 64-bit version. With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” this will hopefully change where the 64-bit version becomes recommended as the default spin. In this article are some updated benchmarks showing the performance of the 32-bit versus 64-bit versions of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.

Referring to Ubuntu’s emphasis on usability, Mark Shuttleworth described making Unity the default desktop environment as “the biggest leap forward in that mission that Ubuntu has ever taken . . . . We brought something new to the very core of the user experience.”

That was ten months ago. Since then, many distributions have shown an unmistakable lack of enthusiasm for adding Unity to their repositories.

For instance, a small group of Debian developers is packaging Unity, but their work remains incomplete, with the preparation of one package blocked by a dependency problem. Moreover, to judge from seventeen months of light traffic on the mailing list, the project seems a low priority.

In fact, the enthusiasm for Unity is decidedly subdued in many quarters. On the LinuxQuestions’ Members Choice Awards for 2011, Ubuntu remains the favorite desktop distribution, but less than five percent of voters were using Unity.

At Kids on Computers, we’ve spent a lot of time and energy getting computers to kids that have no access to technology. Many of these places (rural Mexico, Africa, India) have cell phones before they have phone lines or even power. (The second time you blow the power for an entire school trying to set up a couple of computers, you realize how much we take power for granted in developing countries.)

After months of anticipation, the tiny $25 computer known as Raspberry Pi is available for purchase. Earlier today, the project Website featured a full-page static announcement of the long awaited news.

The Raspberry Pi is here at last —now what can you do with it? Here is our pick of the project ideas that you can try with your Pi.

Note that not all of these are going to work straight of the bat. The Raspberry Pi is brand new and will require some fiddling to get working properly. Give it a week or so however, and we reckon there will be several pre-packaged installers available for you to use if you lack the skills or time to try these yourself.

Android

Android users will not have to look at the ugly slot in their cars which can’t dock their device. Android leader Samsung is working with Toyota to create Samsung Car Mode Application an in-car solution that connects Samsung smartphones to Toyota’s In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) system.

We tech bloggers spend a lot of time talking about the struggle between iOS, Android and Windows Phone 7. It seems like every week a new survey comes out proving that one is beating the others, with iOS and Android trading places as the “winner.”

I like Android a lot, but I think both its greatest weakness and its greatest strength is the wide variety of hardware that it’s available on. For true Android geeks this vast selection of handsets is amazing, but for the average consumer who just wants a new phone it can be quite daunting.

Google hasn’t been giving us much information about Android here at Mobile World Congress, but then their keynote isn’t for a few more hours. However, a Google Exec has shared a few details and might have just put those “Summer release” rumors to rest regarding Android 5.0 Jelly Bean. Read on for more details and his quotes below.

We knew Panasonic was coming to Mobile World Congress to unveil something special but the details were rather slim. Their first break for the European market came way of the Panasonic Eluga and now they’ve unveiled the Panasonic Eluga Power.

Mozilla

Since its creation over a decade ago, Mozilla has never had its own complete operating system. That’s now about to change as Mozilla is ramping up its Boot to Gecko effort, which will enable Mozilla Firefox-powered phones. Gecko is the underlying rendering framework behind Firefox.

Today Mozilla announced that leading service providers, including Telefonica and Deutsche Telekom, are now supporting the Boot to Gecko (B2G) effort. Additionally, mobile chip vendor Qualcomm is collaborating in the effort, which is all about opening up the mobile web.

Education

When I first went to the dark side, I lamented that I was trading my noble teaching role for that of a dark overlord administrator. Much of the time, this characterization remains true. But as I mature as an educational leader, I find that I am in a more complicated teaching role–not only retaining my former group of students, but also expanding my responsibilities to include teaching teachers.

Project Releases

The HandBrake developers have released version 0.9.6 of the open source, cross-platform video transcoder software. The new version brings many improvements to the video and audio libraries used for both decoding and encoding.

Openness/Sharing

Who says open source is all about code and hackathons have to stick to computer hacking? Code Across America is a different kind of open source community, and it came together on February 25, 2012. This effort was part of civic innovation week (February 24-March 4), where over a dozen cities in the United States have citizens organizing to improve their cities and communities. Simultaneous events included hackathons, unconferences, meet-ups, and Code for America ’brigades’ deploying existing open source applications. This is a story about building community knowledge the open source way, using the open source platform LocalWiki.

With economic problems lingering, many people remain in need of employment and that’s true across the technology sector. Now, a group called DirectEmployers Association has announced a new foundation–DirectEmployers Foundation–that will purportedly leverage open source principles and technology to deliver improved job search and career marketing tools. In addition to standalone tools, the foundation will also focus on APIs and components that can be shared, delivering job search tools and listing to many online sites.

Open Hardware

The designs should become available in May via Facebook-spinoff the Open Compute Project, the company confirmed to ZDNet UK on Friday. The move will come a year after it started publishing the design specifications of its own ultra-efficient servers.

Programming

At the beginning of the year I wrote about how Genode OS had an ambitious road-map for this year after coming up with plans for their own general purpose operating system. Today marks the first release since that point with the release of Genode OS Framework 12.02.

One of the fundamental shifts in Genode’s development that happened this cycle is moving to an open development cycle rather than within the confines of Genode Labs. Genode is now being developed in the open on GitHub.

Security

OPEC currently supplies the world with 32% of its oil. The rest is supplied by Non-OPEC producers. One of the most important distinctions between the two is that OPEC oil largely comes from state-run oil companies. Saudi Aramco in Saudi Arabia, PDVSA in Venezuela, and the National Oil Company of Iran, for example. Meanwhile, in Non-OPEC, production flows from countries mostly through private enterprise: United States, Canada, UK, for example. What has surprised the global oil market over the past 7 years is that this majority segment of world oil production has also remained trapped below a ceiling, despite the price revolution which took oil from under $40 to above $100 a barrel. Free markets are supposed to create more supply, when price rises. New supply has indeed come online in Non-OPEC over the past decade. However, geology has trumped investment. It is geology that determines flow rates.

Finance

Wall Street workers and union hands may seem like total opposites, but employees at an iconic investment bank are countering those preconceived notions.

That’s right, some Goldman Sachs workers in Japan are unionizing, according to the Japan Times (h/t Dealbook). The workers made the decision after the bank allegedly attempted to convince certain employees to voluntarily resign in order to get around Japanese labor laws that make laying off workers difficult.

Intellectual Monopolies

John Bennett draws our attention to Public Knowledge (.org). They “preserve… the openness of the Internet and the public’s access to knowledge; promote… creativity through balanced copyright; and uphold.. and protect… the rights of consumers to use innovative technology lawfully”. In the wake of SOPA/PIPA they have started the internet blueprint an effort to crowdsource legislative proposals to protect internet freedoms.

Copyrights

ACTA

The European Parliament may be adopting a strong political line on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), despite the EU Commission’s attempt to buy time and defuse the debate. Due to the referral of ACTA to the EU Court of Justice, the final vote paving the way for its ratification will be delayed. This will give the EU Parliament time to build up a clear stance on the issues raised by this dangerous trade agreement, do in-depth research and impact assessments, and hopefully define guidelines for a better and fair copyright regime. Citizens must remain mobilized, as they will have many opportunities to weigh in this open process.

A lobby group pushing for ACTA is ICC BASCAP. I remember Cecile Arns(?) as a representative at the first stakeholder meeting, in particular because of her arguing style. That’s my point of interest here. They are kind of hammering these short emotive phrases, you always find a little lighthouse in a sentence. Very professional from a midterm lobbying perspective.

He previously mentioned Pedro Velasco-Martins was leading the WTO TRIPS Council delegation. He is the current Mr. ACTA at the Commission. Arrogance is part of their administrative culture at DG Trade.

At the European Parliament STOA meeting for instance he spoke of China as a “very old, traditional country” while MEP Ruebig was spreading stupid nonsense. They are professional trade negotiators. Skilled persons which get screwed and screw other nations up. You cannot expect them to respond to “suggestions” from Parliament as it would be usual. More than 50 written questions from Parliament to the Commission. Any other Commission initiative would be dead and gone by then.

Summary: Response to articles that name Linux 3.0 as though it’s very new because of SUSE

IT HAS BEEN A long time since a major release of SLE*, which pays Microsoft a portion of the revenue. If CentOS is a “poor man’s RHEL”, then SUSE is a “dumb man’s RHEL” — one dumb enough to pay Microsoft for patents when there is clearly no need.

One might expect Attachmate to have released SLE* 12 by now, but the distribution sometimes look like it’s neglected. A lot of key developers and managers have left as well. Based on the press release and some newsarticles like this one, a service pack is all that Attachmate has to show. As one former Novell employee (Joe Brockmeier) put it, “[t]he move to the 3.0 kernel probably sounds more drastic than it is.”

SUSE today announced the general availability of SUSE® Linux Enterprise 11 Service Pack 2 (SP2). This latest update to the industry’s most interoperable platform for mission-critical computing offers improved performance, reliability and efficiency, while maintaining enterprise quality and application compatibility. Customers can use SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2 to deliver their mission-critical IT services faster, more reliably, and more cost effectively, today and tomorrow.

The whole media spin — the spin about it having Linux 3.0 — is actually unhelpfully deceiving. Had SUSE been up to date, it would have a newer kernel. For those who want something up to date, there are newer distributions which are not taxed by Microsoft. █

Microsoft and Nokia mobile platforms are ‘dead’

RESEARCH PREDICTS that “Android will beat the Iphone ecosystem” this year, while other players including Research in Motion (RIM), Nokia and Microsoft are dead in the water.

According to an analysis of vacancies posed on outsourcing marketplace Freelancer.co.uk, mobile phone jobs were the fastest growing online job category with a 216 per cent increase to 12,262 jobs in 2011. Android jobs ended 2011 by growing 163 per cent to 7,431 jobs, double the Iphone’s 81 per cent growth rate to 12,527 jobs.

Meanwhile, reveals this article from the MSBBC, a new “41-megapixel Nokia smartphone was among the new technology on show during the opening day of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona [...] use its own operating system, Symbian, on the device.”

So, apparently even Nokia, which is run by a Microsoft mole, no longer counts on Windows. █

SOMETIMES THEY blame “Anonymous”; this time they should blame Microsoft. Over the years we have warned about governments depending on Microsoft or even depending on Fog Computing. Here we have a fine example of both exploding at once.

Government needs Free software, not foreign software or proprietary software (or both). Microsoft boosters are unable to cover it up. Many thanks to the two readers who gave us the links and pointers. █

THE APPLE whitewash that we wrote about some days ago did not succeed entirely. This new report speaks of a lesser known problem: “Do you know what it is like to suffer neurological damage from toxins? I do not. I am grateful I don’t suffer from such toxicological poisoning. The Chinese workers employed at an Apple supplier factory did not expect to be poisoned. They did not expect to be suffering neurological damage when they signed on for long hours. They only wanted to improve their lives. The opposite happened and now, for some, it appears too late to reverse the damage.”

In recent days I had chats with someone who worked in such conditions. The grievances of such people are rarely heard. It’s implicitly assumed that their lives are of lower value. Apple is not the sole culprit, but Apple blatantly refused to look into the complaints, so it’s being singled out. █

You know how those pushing the alleged “safety” of Mono back in the day, despite it being patent-encumbered, used to try to minimize the danger by arguing that Microsoft would never sue end users over patent infringement, because there’d be no meaningful financial return? The argument went that Mono was safe, because no rational actor would sue individuals, only deep pockets.

Guess what? Someone has just sued some end users over alleged patent infringement.

Courthouse News had the news first that EveryMD has filed a lawsuit [PDF] alleging patent infringement against Facebook end users, specifically Facebook users who have business accounts, naming Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich as defendants, after Facebook refused to pay a royalty for EveryMD’s patents. The complaint also names as defendants “Does 1-1000″, which it defines as “each a presently unidentified one of an estimated 4,000,000 additional Facebook business account holders that are subject to the jurisdiction of this court.”

Shades of SCO Group, who sued business end users of Linux, like DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone, for alleged copyright infringement after IBM refused to pay them off. They were asking $699 for anyone using a server in the enterprise that ran Linux. EveryMD is asking business accounts on Facebook to pay $500, their “reduced” price. If the group is large enough, $500 each comes to the same as one lump sum from a deep pockets company, I guess is the rationale.

Let’s not forget that Microsoft contributed funds to SCO when it was fighting against Linux. Microsoft is a troll by proxy, always using other companies to do its battles. And right now, as TechDirt puts it, “Patent Aggressor Microsoft Files EU Complaint Against Google/Motorola For Charging Too Much To License Patents”. To quote:

It’s difficult not to look cynically at Microsoft’s latest move to file an antitrust complaint in the EU over Motorola’s patent royalty rates, and think about just how obnoxiously hypocritical Microsoft is being as a company on this particular issue. First off, Microsoft has become a pretty significant patent aggressor over the past few years, filing lawsuits and pressuring companies to pay up. It’s also been a huge fan of patent FUD — especially against open source competitors. Most people assume that Microsoft was the main player behind SCO’s quixotic (but costly and distracting) legal battle against Linux. Then, of course, every so often Microsoft officials insist that Linux infringes on a bunch of its patents, but it never wants to make clear which ones. More recently, of course, Microsoft has been demanding license fees for its patents from a variety of companies making use of Android — to the point that some have argued Microsoft makes more off each Android installation than each Microsoft Phone installation.

Microsoft pretends to be a victim, as we noted the other day. TechDirt adds: “Of course, Microsoft’s almost gleeful blog post about its complaint ignores all of this reality and history, and tries to position it as if Motorola and Google are trying to “kill” web and mobile video by charging too high a royalty rate. Frankly, for anyone who knows anything about Microsoft’s patent practices over the past few years, they’ll see through this and recognize how laughable Microsoft’s claims are.” Microsoft is said to have filed other complaints against Google, but it denies it. Microsoft usually hires proxies to file complaints against Google. In some cases, the agencies are exactly the same, as we witnessed before.

Groklaw has meanwhile provided updates on the Oracle vs. Google case [1, 2]. We believe this case to be a favour from Larry Ellison to his best friend, Steve Jobs. We have already explained and have shown shy. █

Environment/Energy/Wildlife

Almost 80% of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are for food animals. Industrial farms routinely feed these drugs to the animals to promote growth and compensate for unsanitary and overcrowded conditions. This overuse creates antibiotic-resistant bacteria that can spread to humans and cause expensive, hard-to-treat illnesses. …

the current run-up in prices comes despite sinking demand in the U.S. “Petrol demand is as low as it’s been since April 1997,” says Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. … Kloza believes much of the increase is due to speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year, mostly from hedge funds and large money managers.

According to IEA research, 37 governments spent $409bn on artificially lowering the price of fossil fuels in 2010. Critics say the subsidies significantly boost oil and gas consumption and disadvantage renewable energy technologies, which received only $66bn of subsidies in the same year.

In 1994, they quietly purchased Seminis for $1.4 billion in cash. Seminis seeds are carried by some of the best-known gardening catalogs, including Burpee, Park Seed, John Scheeper and others. This purchase, plus the purchase of several smaller seed concerns, has given Monsanto an estimated 40%-80% share of the home vegetable seed market.

My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved

Seven leading climate researchers who themselves were the victims of an email theft which was promoted by the Heartland Institute have written an open letter to the organization, calling on it to refrain from spreading inaccurate information about climate science and attacking climate researchers.

Censorship

To be “forgotten” in the usual sense of the “right to be forgotten”
proponents would typically end up requiring not only that direct
references to sites containing “offending” materials be expunged from
search results, but also links to any sites that so much as
specifically (or in many cases even generally) discuss, critique,
analyze, or otherwise mention the materials in question … we should be concentrating on providing more information, more context in case of disputes, not less

The rich and powerful want their ability to destroy public records. The “forgotten” in the ordinary sense was an artifact of information inefficiency. The information, unless destroyed by the rich and powerful, was always available in libraries and public records, unless destroyed, it just took work to find it and the results were hard to share.

Education Watch

Boasberg, an icon of the national movement pushing high-stakes testing and undermining traditional public education … refuses to live in the district that he governs. Though having no background in education administration, this longtime telecom executive used his connections to get appointed Denver superintendent, and he now acts like a king. From the confines of his distant castle in Boulder, he issues edicts to his low-income fiefdom — decrees demonizing teachers, shutting down neighborhood schools over community objections and promoting privately administered charter schools. Meanwhile, he makes sure his own royal family is insulated in a wealthy district that doesn’t experience his destructive policies.

thanks to leaked documents from the Heartland Institute, we know of a insidious new plan to create a whole K-12 curriculum to spread doubt and make teaching about global warming as controversial topic in public school classrooms as the theory of evolution.

I cannot believe that the ed reform movement has come down to this, releasing teacher evaluations based on test scores and then the New York Post selecting one teacher as the worst teacher in NYC and posting her photo and information on the cover of their rag. Is this what education is supposed to be about?

Since the pilot program that all the ed-reformers in our state applauded, it has now been instituted in our schools. Then last month NWEA “re-calibrated” all of the test scores that had been taken for the last year and guess what? The administrators within SPS stated to use the term “negative growth” when describing test scores. … if this was New York City today, everyone would be blaming the teachers and starting the witch hunt of who should be placed on the pyre first. … One interesting point in all of this is that the test scores of teachers in charter schools have not been published.

So the blame game has no end. When the so called reform programs produce worse results just say it’s all the teacher’s fault again.

Copyrights

It’s so corrupt. Now they want to have longer copyright periods because they say the young artists are relying on this money. The young artists never see any money because they sign away that money to big media corporations, like Universal and Viacom. We, the artists, lose all of our rights to these massive corporations, who then come down heavy on these kids for downloading films and music that we never see a penny from. It’s complete bullshit.

Sharing is good but I can not recommend sharing things owned by gangsters.